Dolphin: the Gamecube & Wii Emulator for Mac

Dolphin is probably the best Gamecube and Wii Emulator for Mac that exists, it’s open source and somewhat regularly updated so you won’t be stuck high and dry like the old GameCube Gcube emulator.

Dolphin supports playing both Wii and Gamecube discs and downloadable games, and it has your typical emulator features like save states, controller support, and various graphical enhancements such as anti-aliasing.

Update: Dolphin is now easier than ever to use, just download the precompiled version here, leaving the technical process below behind. You can still use the methods outlined below if you’d like, but it may be unnecessarily complicated just to get the Dolphin emulator running.

Getting Dolphin running requires a bit more technical knowledge than just downloading an application and installing it, you’ll need the following:

The first thing you’ll need to do is download and install both Xcode and MacPorts, they are both pretty simple to install if you haven’t done so already.

Next you’ll need to use MacPorts to install some of the Dolphin dependencies on your Mac, the first is called SCons, which you can install by typing:sudo port install scons

Next you need to install the aforementioned wxWidgets from their SVN repository:svn co -r66144 http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/trunk wxWidgets

Then you have to configure the build environment, as follows:cd wxWidgets/build
../configure --disable-shared --enable-image --enable-universal_binary --with-aui --with-cocoa \
--with-macosx-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk --with-macosx-version-min=10.5

Finally you can compile and make wxWidgets:make && sudo make install

Once all that is done, you can finally grab the latest Dolphin emulator source from the Google code repository:svn co http://dolphin-emu.googlecode.com/svn/trunk dolphin-emucd dolphin-emu

Then you use the previously installed SCons to build Dolphin:scons verbose=true wxconfig=/usr/local/bin/wx-config

Now you should be done and you can finally launch Dolphin and emulate Gamecube and Wii games on your Mac. As I said, this is a somewhat laborious and technical process so the average Mac user might not want to bother. If you get confused along the way, you can checkout the GitHub code project for Dolphin, which provides installation instructions as well.

I have heard murmurings that Dolphin will come to the iPhone and iPad eventually too. With the Wii gesture games, this would be a natural fit, so let us cross our fingers that it happens.

This is not working for me. Terminal does not know what to do with the command “sudo port install scons”. I admit I don’t know what all this stuff means or how it’s all supposed to work. It seems like this guide is for more advanced users who know what all this stuff means.

“You are running ports on interactive mode, and you are not in your system shell. The port program won’t recognize sudo as one of its commands, and I am guessing you didn’t run your port command with sudo so you won’t be able to do much, try the following:

* Click on your terminal.

* Press command + Q (command is the key left of your space bar)

* Open your terminal once again and do not run anything on else but the command suggested:

* Type: sudo port -v selfupdate

If you get the same thing, you are still or again in Macports interactive session, type CTRL + C, or type quit.
”

Backed up and reformatted (other issues were present that necessitated this) and it worked this time around, but it failed to install zlib under my having an incompatible Xcode version (3.0) claiming that I need 3.1. 3.0 is what my OS x disk installed.

Got through everything except the last step; when I go to build, it does a few things and then starts giving me a handful of errors saying “error: expected unqualified-id before ‘=’ token”. The build then terminates and kicks me out to the prompt. Any ideas?

yer!!!!!!!!! finally did it, only had a mac for like a week, dont know anything bout them, but i did it, had 2 go 2 the other link 2 build it thou. took me a good few hours but worth it. thanks. i got zelda for my first game. im so smart. :)

Im having problems with getting .gcm files to load on the precompiled dolphin emulator for my mac. Ive downloaded a couple different .gcm’s and a few different versions of dolphin from this site but every time I click the .gcm file, dolphin opens along with another blank window labeled at the top “clearing code cache” and then quits unexpectedly. Do you have a solution to this or any insight into whats wrong?

configure: WARNING: Disabling precompiled headers due to universal binary build.
checking for SDK directory /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk… configure: error: not found
See `config.log’ for more details.

This probably won’t be seen, but incase anyone else has this issue, here is the solution:

You probably just don’t have the sdk in that location. Try changing the with-macosx-version-min and with-macosx-skd to
–with-macosx-version-min=10.7
and
–with-macosx-sdk=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.7.sdk

Anyone know the.nest controller to use for a gamecube emulator on the mac? I try to use a ps3 and it wont work. I have trird an.xbox 360 but the website to download the software to make the controller compatiable isnt working. Any advice?

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